The finished production version will be made available to MSDN subscribers online in the next three weeks and will be closely followed by the packaged version in December of this year. As is now widely known, there will be no public release candidate, with Microsoft relying on private testing over the last few weeks to get the job done on a tight timeline. The code is now into regression testing, so the release track looks assured.
Beyond this headline, there were a number of other key themes for the presentation. The biggest of which must surely have been Community. Microsoft is pushing the idea of a .NET development community hard and is releasing a wave of innovations to try to foster one. These range from small scale changes, like adding wiki functionality to the developer documentation on MSDN, to larger ones like encouraging community translation of .NET documentation beyond the nine localizations officially supported, and a new Code Gallery initiative set to be publically released early in 2008 which will see developers uploading their own code demonstrations to a centrally held repository.
The next biggest theme – and only marginally smaller than the first – was an emphasis on Microsoft’s platform initiatives. From .NET 3.5 to XNA it was stressed that Microsoft was, at its heart, a Platforms company and that it was through innovation in the depth and range of those platforms that it hopes to succeed in future. This line of thinking is supported by the ever expanding range of platforms becoming available from the .NET Micro Framework to the Compact Framework to Sharepoint to XNA.
This led naturally to a discussion of the tools that are available for development across these varied Platforms and of Visual Studio 2008 in particular. There were several demos showing a wide range of features. Those that stood out were:
• Framework Targeting – Studio can now build for .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 Frameworks at the flick of a switch, so you can use the latest toolset even if you’re working with an older code base – there’s no need for virtualization.
• Full integration of the ASP.NET AJAX and .NET 3.0 toolkits (this wasn’t really news), but the demonstration of the fully integrated JavaScript intellisense and debugging was slick, smooth and convincing.
• Full integration of VSTO allowing seamless building of applications targeted to Office 2007.
• A quick demonstration of the seamless workflow and version control between Visual Studio 2008 and Expression.
• A split-design view in VS (as seen in Expression) to allow you to see the design result and the markup simultaneously. This isn’t new, of course, it’s been in Dreamweaver for years but it’s good to finally have it.
• More expression DNA has been imported in the shape of ‘breadcrumbs’ hierarchy representations of HTML rendering paths and detailed CSS property representations.
• An auto-upgrader has been created to take some of the pain out of migrating code from previous .NET versions to .NET 3.5 (it remains to be seen how useful this is).
• And finally, a new key combination: Ctrl K+D will tidy up and indent your code for you when you find that your edits have messed up the formatting.
In terms of smaller themes there was some mention of the forthcoming Dynamic language initiatives, but nothing really in-depth. The biggest remaining theme was a loosening of Microsoft’s Partner program to be more in keeping with its new-found community theme. Previously Partners were restricted to using MS tools only on the MS platform, but this constraint has now been removed to allow the tools to be used in building applications for any platform. Platinum partners will be given access to Studio source code to assist in their debugging efforts, but this is a perk that will benefit only the few*.
Finally, some time was spent looking at how Microsoft was seeking to broaden its reach across the whole range of application ‘developers’, from Visual Studio Team System at one extreme to Popfly at the other with Office and VS Express in between. A new Popfly extra, called Popfly Explorer is being made available in beta today and allows the creation of highly functional web applications with very little need for code. In the same vein an open source project is being released on Codeplex shortly that allows Studio to be used to communicate with the World of Warcraft online game engine through an interface between .NET and Lua – an example of Microsoft’s toolset being used to build applications cross-platform into a different environment.
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*A boot note: having sat through Microsoft keynote demonstrations for many years, I’m struck that they always focus on the enterprise developer. The demos they run are impressive, but bare little relation to what many of the people watching them will actually be doing: time for some more down-to-earth demos?
